News

University of Westminster’s David Hendy, mixes Edwardian science and fiction in his new play ‘Between Two Worlds’, to be broadcast Sunday 20:45 on BBC Radio 3

21 July 2010

On Sunday 25 July, BBC Radio 3 broadcasts Between Two Worlds, co-written by David Hendy, Reader of Communication and Media at the University of Westminster and the television dramatist Adrian&nbsp;Bean.

The play centres around Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the 'inventors' of radio and an established scientist of the Edwardian era, desperate to find a way to communicate, using séances, with his son, Raymond, killed on the Western Front in 1915. Sir Oliver believed he had cracked the thin veil that separates two worlds.

David Hendy describes Oliver Lodge as, “Focusing on the links between his work on wireless and the 'ether' and his personal interest in spiritualism: it's a kind of Edwardian ghost-story with physics - plus a bit of media history!”

The 90-minute full-cast production, recorded on location, stars Owen Teale and Amanda Root. It runs in the prestigious 'Drama on 3' slot, used for classic plays and original work.

David Hendy is a media historian with a broad interest in the social and cultural impact of broadcasting and cinema over the past two centuries. Before joining the University of Westminster in 1993 he studied history at St Andrews and Oxford and then worked as a senior producer in the BBC for six years on series such as The World Tonight and Analysis. He continues to be involved in broadcasting. In 2010 he’s writing and presenting a series of five programmes for The Essay on Radio 3 – called ‘Rewiring the Mind’ - and is the co-writer for a forthcoming Radio 3 dramatization of the life of the Victorian scientist Oliver Lodge.

His books include Radio and the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) and Life on Air: a History of Radio Four (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which won the History Today-Longmans Book of the Year Award in 2008 and was nominated for the Orwell Prize. He’s also written about aspects of broadcasting and cultural history in a range of journals and magazines, including Cinema Journal, Media History, the Journal of Radio Studies, Media, Culture & Society, History Today, the BBC History magazine, Press Gazette, New Humanist, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and The International Encyclopedia of Communication, and has contributed to a number of radio programmes in Britain and overseas..

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